


sit in the grass and be tender all day

by feralphoenix



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Autistic Frisk, Borderline Personality Disorder, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - C-PTSD, Cultural Alienation, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Nonverbal Frisk, Other, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Puberty, Spoilers - Undertale Pacifist Route, Sukkot | Tabernacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 14:18:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16176800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: Frisk tries to celebrate a favorite holiday for the first time in years, and help Chara reconnect while they're at it.





	sit in the grass and be tender all day

**Author's Note:**

> _(what matters is what it will become_ – a happy blend of pine, and primrose, and rhododendron)
> 
>  
> 
> title is from [this prose post](https://marchenwings.tumblr.com/post/176414969934/).

“Do you need any more sticks or can I put them down now?” Asriel says from the ground below. “I mean, yeah, it’s cool watching you build the hut thingie, but I wanna go watch TV.”

“I think that we are about done,” Asgore tells him. He doesn’t move his head, which is lucky for you, as you’re leaning on his horn for balance as much as the hand he’s got on your thigh to keep you steady. “And you may watch your animes while Frisk and I are preparing dinner so that I can watch you from the kitchen, but I think you shouldn’t take your tablet outside to watch more. Your mother did say that you aren’t supposed to be using it right now.”

_“First_ of all, Magical Yu-Na isn’t an _anime, Dad,_ it’s a Korean cartoon that uses Western style cartoon designs, not Japanese ones,” Asriel says. “And second, that’s so dumb! This isn’t Mom’s house. I don’t have to listen to Mom rules here.”

“Hmmm,” says Asgore. “I think that Toriel would probably disagree with that. And besides, I think we’re supposed to be spending our afternoons outside for this week. Isn’t that right, Frisk?”

You tug on the raffia you’re using to tie the branches to the frame of the sukkah just to make extra sure it’s secure before letting go to answer. _At least we’re supposed to eat dinner out here, and since you and Chara and me are going to stay out in the tent, wouldn’t it be nice to just enjoy the weather?_

“I’m gonna get my clothes dirtyyyyy,” Asriel whines, shifting his armful of branches. He looks down at his cardigan with dismay. “Dirti _er.”_

“That is fine,” Asgore says. “We can wash them. Your mother said she made sure not to pack anything that delicate for any of you.”

“I _guess_ I’ll resign myself to my horrible fate as long as I get to watch tonight’s new episode,” Asriel says, reaching up with one hand to scritch at the base of one of his little horn buds.

“You must not scratch.”

_“It itches,”_ Asriel complains.

“I know, but it is not good for you to scratch.”

_I think this is enough for the roof,_ you say to distract them from arguing.

You’ve never actually built a sukkah before, you’ve only been to the big community ones they used to build at your old temple, so you looked up pictures of them on the internet for reference. Asgore’s yard being the biggest and most expansive, you decided to set it up here and stay at his house for the length of the holiday; since he works at Toriel’s school anyway he doesn’t have to go out of his way to get you there every day. And together, you built the sukkah—well, really Asgore cut boards and nailed things and bought bug curtains, you just helped to hold things and pick stuff out.

But you got to put the branches on the roof and tie them, and you had _executive control_ over the project, and you’re really happy about that. The sukkah may not be as fancy as the one you remember from the next town over’s synagogue, but you like the way the bug curtains rustle in the wind on the two open walls, and Asgore made sure it would be big enough to fit whole benches inside, enough room for all your friends.

…Not that all your friends will necessarily be able to come at once, not this year at least. And you’re still not sure whether Mettaton and Mew Mew can or would want to eat physical food. But most of them will be able to visit for at least one night this week, and you’ll be able to eat dinner together then.

Asgore carefully helps you down off his shoulder and to your feet at his side. (Your chin’s still only about level with his elbow, despite that you’ve definitely grown over the past three years.) He smiles down at you and sets a very gentle hand atop your head.

“Golly, it sure has turned out nice, huh?” he says, beaming. “It was tough to clean up after the storm last week, but it turned into a stroke of luck to have all these branches ready to make a roof with.”

“Should I put them somewhere special or can I just, like, drop ‘em?” Asriel asks a bit wearily, leaning forward and squinting at you as if to make sure you can see him around his father’s arm.

“You can set them on the deck, dear,” Asgore says, and Asriel turns in a flutter of fluffy skirts to retreat towards said deck, apparently anxious to fling himself into the arms of his favorite cartoon.

You don’t really begrudge him getting into fashion and makeup, because both of those can be a lot of fun, and he really seems to enjoy them! But sometimes you _do_ miss the days when Asriel was more willing to run around outside with you and Chara.

Speaking of whom, they’ve been awfully quiet so far today. They were watching from the deck earlier—have they gone back inside the house?

Despite yourself, you hold your breath as you tiptoe up the garden path and then the steps to the deck. You pause on the top one and look around, but the deck’s walls are about level with your shoulders here, and all the heavy plant pots and the lanterns for monster fire obscure your view. You grip the walls for balance and lean forward onto your toes, just shy of toppling.

…There they are, curled up on their side on the wood benches built into the walls, face all drawn and pale and scowly. They have their arms crossed over their stomach and their legs crossed at the ankles, and if they were curled up any tighter they’d be in the fetal position.

You make a face, a little. Chara’s been in a real bad mood for a couple days now. You _guess_ you can’t begrudge that—they have to take strong pain pills every six hours to be able to bear being on their period, and it doesn’t help that they bled through their pants once that first day. It seems rough, and you’re well aware that you can’t really appreciate what they’re going through—you’ve never had a period yet, and Toriel and your doctor still aren’t sure whether you ever will. If not for the uncertainty, it’d almost make you glad to be intersex.

But you were _hoping_ that this might help cheer Chara up. It’s their first time actually getting to celebrate Sukkot, after all.

You step gingerly up onto the deck and knock on the wall to announce yourself. Chara opens their eyes and stares at you, raising their eyebrows without commenting.

You try to smile, gesturing behind you. _It’s done!_

Chara grunts and hauls themself into an upright posture, turning to squint at the finished sukkah and Asgore clearing up the remaining tools. They stare for what feels like a long long time, expression barely changing. Then, only turning towards you slightly, they ask, “Is putting up bug curtains really kosher?”

_We always did at temple, so I’m guessing so,_ you tell them. _I mean, the rabbi would know if anyone would. As long as at least one side is open and you can see the sky through the roof I’m pretty sure it’s fine._

Chara makes a noncommittal noise and slowly sets one foot, then the other onto the wood paneling of the deck. They take a deep breath and then heave up onto their feet, and slouch towards the back door even slower than Gerson. They slide it open, step through, and slide it shut but not all the way. You hurry over to it, push it further open so you can squeak through, and then push it all the way closed behind you so bugs won’t get inside.

Asriel is already on the couch with Asgore’s TV on, the bright and cheerful music and dialogue of his show a low hum in the backdrop. Still cautious just a bit, you lift one foot up behind you and pull the shoe off, set it on the mat, repeat the process with the other. You take a few steps towards the living room to look: Chara has sat down beside Asriel and is leaning on him. They aren’t watching the show; they’re flipping through something on their phone, and judging by the way they’re bouncing their foot that’s probably failing to hold their interest too. The backlit screen illuminates their face at weird angles and makes light dance over their locket as they tilt their phone back and forth minutely.

The back door slides open again, and you turn to watch Asgore step politely inside and close it behind himself: Even though this house was built to accommodate larger monsters with its tall doorframes and high ceilings, the handle looks child-sized between his fingers, and he’s delicate while handling it.

“Well, Frisk,” he says, smiling down at you, “shall we get to work on tonight’s dinner?”

You smile at him and nod. _Okay, Dad._

 

 

At its heart Sukkot is a harvest festival, and harvest festivals are all about seasonal crops. At temple there were some people who liked to try to use Mediterranean and Middle Eastern dishes to honor the 40 years in the desert that the holiday nominally commemorates, but you don’t really know any recipes that use dates and stuff, neither does Asgore, and those kinds of foods are pretty expensive out here.

There _is_ a ton of local produce that you got to pick up, though—squash and pumpkin and apples and chestnuts; pretty jewel-colored corn and wild rice that Asgore got from local indigenous sellers. Potatoes and tomatoes and bell peppers and cabbage from the local farmers’ market and Asgore’s own garden. Freshly ground wheat flour, which you’re going to be using tomorrow with cans of pumpkin puree to make pumpkin challah. You can never go wrong with bread and rice.

Asgore cuts open the squashes for you, since you’re not allowed to handle the big knife by yourself yet; you cut the smaller vegetables and fruits, and boil the rice and wild grains in a pot. Rice by itself is easier to prepare by just using a rice cooker, but cooking it on the stove instead gives you more fine control over ingredients you’re not used to using and need to fuss with more. Adding these kinds of squash to takikomi gohan isn’t something you’ve tried before, and you want the end result to be perfectly sweet and savory, so the range it is.

“Would you like to take the rest of the equipment outside?” Asgore asks. “I will watch the food while you do.”

You smile and sign _ok!_ and gather up potatoes and olive oil, lemon juice and a pepper grider in a bag. The eggs will have to wait until you’re actually out and ready to eat, but you tuck the grater under your arm and pick up the tiny camping stove in that hand. With the bag handles over your other arm, that still leaves you with one hand to work the door.

Stepping onto the deck, you’re enveloped in light that warms your shoulders and the back of your head. Fall is coming, the leaves will probably be turning soon, but for now it’s at that perfect impossibly-temperate window of golden days. You couldn’t have asked for better weather—and not just because this has made it easier to convince Toriel to let you camp outside whenever it’s clear.

You step carefully down the deck stairs, watch your feet to make sure you don’t catch them on something and drop everything all over the yard. Then all that’s left to do is duck under the bug curtains and set the ingredients and tools out on the table.

It’s even nicer, inside the sukkah. The light filtering between the roof’s branches and the little holes in the curtains paints the tables and the ground in splashes and dapples of sun that fade and brighten as clouds pass overhead. You have to squint when you look up, the shade around you makes the lenses of your glasses lighten, but it’s still beautiful and calming and sunset and the night sky are going to be great to watch from here too.

You sit on the bench and pull out your phone, deploying your chosen etrog for this week.

At temple you remember sometimes having actual citrons in years where the American crop of them had been good or they could be properly imported, but whenever that couldn’t happen the rabbi tended to substitute a lemon or some other citrus fruit—better to have one that fulfilled the commandments of a healthy, perfect fruit than to have a blemished citron.

You have some feelings about that that aren’t particularly positive, but since you don’t know much about importing citrons from overseas or from the faraway coast, you can’t very well demand to buy all the almost-but-still-not-good-enough ones. Since it was your best option, you picked out the nicest-smelling, biggest lemon you could find.

Chara, who decided not to go to the supermarket because of all the humans, gave you a very dubious eyebrow when you showed it to them, but they didn’t say anything about it. And you don’t feel great about _that_ either, but you guess there’s not much you can do about that.

Your options are limited and you’ve decided to do the best with them that you can because at least you have options. That is, sort of, one of the things that Sukkot is even about.

The sound of the door sliding open and shut catches your attention, and you duck back under the bug curtain—maybe it’s Asgore, come to tell you to help him with dinner. Maybe you’ve been out too long, lost in your thoughts.

It isn’t him at all, though—your visitor turns out to be Asriel, who has a spatula in his hand. When he sees you he holds it up and waves it: “Dad says you forgot this.”

He comes down the steps to meet you, to pass it into your hands, and he stays there with his hands behind his head and one paw scuffing the grass while you set the spatula with the other things. Your ears are burning—of course you can’t make latkes in such a tiny pan without a spatula, unless you want one side to get torched while the other stays underdone.

When you duck back out into the sun, Asriel is still there. Waiting for you, maybe, you think until he points at the family-sized tent still in its bag a few feet away from the sukkah. “Dad also said that since my show is over we should put that up.”

You nod to him. _No Chara?_

Asriel wrinkles his muzzle. He steps away from the garden path and you fall into step with him, traversing the grass to the tent. “They’re still lying on the couch. They seem pretty… grumpy. I think Dad wants to let them rest for as long as we can.”

You make a low noise in the back of your throat.

It is not the first time you’ve set up a tent, or set one up together—you’ve been hiking before with Asgore, and with Undyne and Alphys—so you hold the bag and he pulls, and you take opposite sides of the canvas and delicate poles. Your sleeping bags are all inside, still; you’ll bring them out when it’s time to go to bed, you suppose.

Asriel’s getting taller. Technically he surpassed you and Chara in height last year when you were all twelve, but only by an inch; it wasn’t particularly apparent. You think you can tell now, though; if he’s standing side by side with Chara it’s easier to see how the top of his head is higher than theirs. You don’t have to look up at him yet, but you don’t doubt that that day won’t be far off.

By now he’s noticed you staring, and pauses in hammering a peg to look you in the face and raise his eyebrows. “What?”

You smile. “Just looking at you.”

Whether it’s your open admission or the fact that you spoke aloud rather than let go of the tent, Asriel turns away so quickly that his own ear hits him in the snout. He makes a face, blinking rapidly. After a few breaths he appears to remember what he had been doing with his hands and decisively taps the peg into the ground. Then he drops the mallet carelessly and stands up, brushing out the voluminous skirts.

You finish hammering your own peg and push yourself up. Asriel says nothing, staring mutely into the distance. You glance around the yard yourself, and into the horizon, the distant outlines of houses on one side and the wild grasses on the other, the bulk of the mountain.

When your gaze falls again upon the house you nearly jump out of your skin: There’s Chara, standing with their nose almost pressed to the glass, staring out with intensity. There is a fathomless hunger in their eyes, but their expression is otherwise closed.

It’s almost uncanny, the way this situation mirrors how you’ve felt over the past few days of planning—that you and Chara are standing on opposite sides of a barrier, at no fault of yours or theirs, and that both of you know but haven’t said that what you can give may not, will probably not, be enough.

If you went to Asgore and told him that you changed your mind, there’s been a mistake, take the sukkah down, you aren’t ready—he would probably understand. But Asriel wouldn’t, and Chara would understand too much, that this is you admitting defeat.

But the only _real_ way to fix the hurt that’s eating Chara from the inside would be to go back in time and get rid of their father and fix the population disparity in Ebott City back when it was still just a village. And you don’t think that even the player would have been able to do something like _that._ Ebott City is nearly completely gentile even _now._

You just—you know how easily this could turn into a wrongness between you that could never ever be bridged. And you’d give anything to avoid that, except that you think you’ve come too far to do that.

“They’re impatient,” Asriel says mildly, apparently just having noticed Chara staring out at you. “C’mon, let’s go finish dinner so we can eat it out here, if we _must.”_

You take a deep breath and try to put on a brave face and nod.

 

 

Chara helps a little in bringing all the food outside, though Asgore lets them stick to the lighter dishes and utensils. In spreading things out between everyone’s places, they pause for a moment and look at the camping stove you’ve unfolded and the bag of food, raising their eyebrows.

“I am actually craving grease right now,” they say, voice raspy from pain and how little they’ve spoken today, “but are latkes _really_ supposed to be this all-purpose? Somehow or other we wind up eating them on like _every_ holiday.”

You have to take a deep breath and exhale before answering. You don’t think Chara notices. _Well, potatoes and cabbage are in-season and that’s what I’m using to make them, so I think it’s fair to have them. Besides, they’re like your second favorite food after chocolate, and I wanted to try making mini patties with the cooking stove anyway. I get to have fun and you get to eat something that will make you feel better, isn’t that fine?_

“I guess that is fair,” they say. You can’t tell whether their tone is genuinely mollified or if they only sound like that to you because you just want them to be so bad. Once the table is set they reach for the etrog in the middle of the table and balance it in their hands for a moment, leaning in to smell. “Mmm, lemon.”

The words are distinctly wry, and tension ratchets back into your spine. _Maybe we’ll be able to actually get a citron next year, but for now this is good enough._

They nod and put it down, then look at you slantwise and make the sign for citron a little sloppily. “Is… this right?”

_Almost,_ you tell them, and show them again more slowly. They’ll pick it up properly once they’ve seen you use it enough—they’re always quick enough with terminology.

The clunk of Asgore setting down the tall pot of rice and vegetables in the middle of the table startles you into jumping. “All right, you two,” he says, smiling down at you across the bench. (Asriel, next to him, is already sitting down, fussing with his skirts as if in fear of the wood snagging the fabric.) “There are prayers that must be said before we partake of this meal, are there not?”

You stick out your tongue, trying to think. _Um. There’s the lulav and then Shehecheyanu also because tonight is the first night, and then Hamotzi, and then a blessing for the sukkah and that should be it._ You pull out your phone and flip through your inventory with a thumb. “Which way is east?”

“That way,” Asgore tells you, pointing with his forearm and hand. You smile up at him and tap on your touch screen, deploying your trusty old stick into your free hand. It’s dear to your heart, and has seen you through so many troubles—sure, it’s not exactly _conventional,_ but you’ve had to cobble things together by yourself as it is. You don’t think there’s anything better you could use as a substitute.

You set your phone down on the table and reach for the lemon.

“You’re really going to use _that_ as the lulav?” Chara asks. The incredulity, the disbelieving _offense,_ in their voice snaps your hand into a fist before your outstretched fingers can touch the peel of the fruit. Dully you are aware of the flush in your face and, worse, the vague stinging behind your eyes. It’s a sensation that you’d normally respond to by closing them, rocking on your feet, breathing deep.

Instead you turn to look Chara full in the face, shifting your hand along the crackly bark of the stick. It’s old and quite dry by now, and if you aren’t careful it could snap between your fingers.

“Well, if you know where you could get a kosher date palm frond and a myrtle branch in _this_ part of America, then be my guest!”

Chara flinches, their face going from creased as though looking down on you to pinched and pale, their eyes wide. They seem to shrink in front of you, sinking into themself almost like they expect you to strike them.

“I’m sorry,” they say, small and faint. “I’m—I’m sorry. I’ll—go.”

And before your head has quite caught up to what’s happening in front of you, they turn and duck back under the bug net and flee. Asriel stands up, and Asgore calls their name, but they’re already vanishing around the corner of the deck.

 

 

Searching for Chara when they don’t want to be found is, to put it gently, an ordeal. Once they’ve made a quick exit they are very good at hiding—they don’t have favorite spots, so if you can’t get into their head you could turn over an entire building and still miss whatever nook they’ve tucked themself into. It’s a very hard-won skill, from what you saw of their memories; there are times where their life itself depended on it, or at least they strongly believed that it did.

So making a lot of noise searching for them is, generally, counterproductive: It cements whatever fears made them run in the first place and makes them less likely to come out anytime soon. Generally, it is better to let Chara come back on their own, because unless the situation is very extreme they _do_ stay in or around the house, and if they don’t feel chased they can return to you all at their own pace. But dinner is getting cold on the table in the sukkah and you’re going to lose the light, and if you can’t manage to properly celebrate tonight—if you can’t manage to repair what’s gone wrong—you wouldn’t be surprised if they become shy of it forever.

This is the opposite of what you intended to happen today. So, you search.

“I can’t find them _anywhere,”_ Asriel says miserably, leaned over, puffing.

You make a face. _Take over for Dad watching the food? He can take over searching for you, there are still some places that I want to check._

“Okay,” Asriel says. “But if we can’t find them before seven…”

_Then we can—I don’t know, text them or something, try to work things out that way,_ you fill in. _But at least first let me try._

Usually he gets sullen when you imply that you’re better at finding Chara than he is—he had almost a year’s worth of practical experience before the three of you began living together, after all, to your few days living with Chara in your head—but today Asriel just nods and claps a hand to your shoulder.

You circle around the yard, from one end of the backyard fence to the other, reaching out one hand to pet the plants that rise high enough. Chara always has a knack for finding the exact safest spot—not the one that people would overlook because it seems too obvious, since when other hiding places prove empty searchers tend to turn to the obvious spots in frustration. No, Chara’s first choice tends to be hiding places that no one would even consider potential hiding places at all. If you hadn’t been connected you’d be the most hopeless at ever finding them at times like these—you who always stayed right where you’d been put, hoping against reason to be found, reclaimed.

Chara seemed to evaporate as soon as they were around the deck, and so when you turn the corner behind which they had earlier disappeared you narrow your eyes and glance around. None of the trees here are big enough to support the weight of a small teenager and they would definitely have made noise if Chara had climbed one. They might have ducked into a bush, but you don’t think any are large enough to be duck-into-able without significant rustling.

So, if they didn’t sneak back into the house… You sink down to your knees, slowly, and peer into the dark crawlspace beneath the deck.

They’re there, so far in that they must be almost pressed up to the house’s siding. Curled into a motionless ball with their face in their knees and their arms locked tight around their shins, silent, probably still listening for the thunder of footsteps from above them.

You take a deep breath and square your shoulders. Asgore coated the crawlspace with smooth stones to keep it from getting overgrown, and those aren’t comfortable to kneel on at all. It’s also dirty under there. You’re glad that you chose to wear leggings instead of tights today; the latter probably wouldn’t survive a trip to go fetch Chara, and you’re the only one who _can_ go. Asgore is too big to fit under here, and Asriel would complain about ruining his clothes to avoid the claustrophobic earthy space and any possible triggers with it.

You venture in. The stones are painful on your wrists and your knees and your feet shift them as you move, but Chara doesn’t unfold their body and flee. You creep closer and closer, until you can sit at their side, carefully wiping your hands off on your thighs.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” you say.

Chara shifts where they sit but they don’t uncurl to look at you. _“I’m_ sorry,” they say, muffled and very small. “This is your favorite holiday and you were trying to do something nice for me and I just—I ruined everything. I don’t have the right to, to criticize anything. I’ve never done this before. I’m not really a real—my opinion shouldn’t matter. I’m sorry.”

“Chara, you _are_ Jewish enough for your opinion to matter. And I just—I wanted to make today perfect so bad, I was scared I was letting you down because I can’t make things exactly right like they would at temple. Whenever you asked about things that weren’t traditional it felt like you were looking down on me for being too casual, but I’m the one who put the pressure on myself, so it’s not fair to blame you for it.” You lean softly until your shoulder fetches up against theirs.

“Sometimes it felt like—like I was getting patronized. Like, sure, let’s play at celebrating Sukkot, because you’re not good enough to do it for real, you weren’t raised in a real community. Even though I _know_ you’ve just been trying your best, and it’s ungrateful to feel like this, I _shouldn’t_ feel like this. I don’t know how I’m ever going to feel like I’m worth anything.”

You shift some of the stones under your heel. “If we went to temple we’d be b’nei mitzvah this year, both of us.”

Chara laughs. The light filters in all around the edges of the deck but it can’t reach the two of you here in the dark. “Would a temple community even know what to do with us?”

“I don’t know. I think the good ones should.” You can’t judge for your old temple, because your parents had decided to raise you as a girl, likely assuming it would be simpler for them; they’d never given the rabbi a chance to treat you as intersex. Chara has talked before about how there’s supposed to be words and roles for different kinds of trans and intersex people in the Torah but their bringing it up was the first time you ever heard any of it.

“We should be complaining about this kind of thing to our therapists, probably,” Chara says thickly. “But they won’t really get it either.”

You don’t have anything you can really say to that, so you just drape an arm loosely around their back. At this point, you have at least some faith that it won’t be unwelcome or spook them into running again.

“What the fuck are we supposed to do?” they say, bitter and low.

You squeeze. “We can go back out, and eat dinner. And we can still do the blessings, and still camp outside tonight, if you want to. It’s not going to be perfect. We don’t have a citron or a real lulav. But it’s what we have for right now. I think it’s better to still do what we can.”

“Right,” Chara says, and sighs, and laughs a little. “What sort of divine positive reinforcement would we get, do you think, if god is a conscious creature that’s paying attention to mortals right now? They turn your stick into a lulav after all? Or maybe that would be too flashy, since it’s not like we’ve just defended a city from an army of rando goyim demanding we assimilate or die. Maybe we’d just get really nice weather all week and Toriel lets us actually sleep in the sukkah instead of insisting on the tent.”

You giggle. “Or a week of great weather and then when we try sleeping in the sukkah it rains a little just to let us know to not get all entitled.”

Chara laughs a little more. The sound is very wet. “Frisk, I really _am_ sorry. What you said about how you put pressure on yourself—like, even with that, I still hurt your feelings and that still sucks. I… ugh, I just said a lot of stuff about how I don’t have the right to feel resentful so this probably sounds hypocritical ‘cause I’m really bad at radical acceptance. But it’s okay to feel hurt about it. You don’t have to try to logic yourself out of having emotions. Whenever I try to my therapist just gives me this Look and reminds me that feelings aren’t good or bad, what matters is how you act on them, knowing where they come from is important but not judging them is even MORE important, blah blah.”

You begin to frown. “Actually this is what my therapist says I _should_ do all the time because my feelings are too big and irrational and bad.”

“Oh.” A long silence. “You don’t ever get the ‘clouds can’t disappear unless it rains’ talk?”

“Never.”

Another long silence. “Maybe we should tell Toriel about this later.”

Maybe you should. Asriel and Chara come back from therapy upset sometimes but it always seems _different,_ somehow, from how it feels for you, like they come back with catharsis at least and you can’t seem to find it. You’ve always been so sure that you’re the problem, that you’re just not trying hard enough or that you must be doing something wrong. But if that’s not true…

You don’t really want to think about this right now. There’s so much to worry about already. So you just say “Maybe” and then give Chara a bracing squeeze. “Can we go back out now?”

“Yeah, I—” They breathe out under your arm, against your side, long and steady. “Yeah.”

Fumbling and awkward, you both crawl back down the direction you came, into the late afternoon light. You stay crouched at the edge of the deck with your eyes mostly shut, waiting for the searing brightness to darken your glasses so you’ll be able to see; Chara crawls out next to you in a rattle of stone and holds your hands, pulling you to your feet.

You risk squinting. Chara is half-looking at you, face still red and very wet. You squeeze their hands. They lean into your front, sliding their hands out of yours to loop their arms loosely around your waist instead, resting their chin on your shoulder.

“I just want to hurry up and stop _bleeding_ all the time,” they grumble, shivering. You wrap your own arms around their back. “I feel gross and awful and _everything_ makes me feel so much more frustrated and I don’t know how to deal with it. I need to learn so I can stop making such a big fucking deal over every little thing.”

“It’s going to be ok,” you say, soft, and turn your head a little so that you can kiss the side of their face.

Chara responds to this by turning _their_ head so that they can kiss you back, this time on the mouth.

The ground under your feet is not perfectly even; you have to be careful how you hold your weight, and you forget to tilt your head so Chara’s nose gets in the way, and their face is still sticky with tears and it makes their mouth taste like salt. It’s sloppy, and clumsy, and awkward, because it’s new, and you have yet to find your feet. But you like the way it tingles all through you, the way it makes your heart beat faster. You like the way their body feels, pressed up tight to yours. You like being able to use your lips and tongue to say _I love you_ without having to scrabble for words and regulate your tone.

Chara pulls back just a little, producing a wet noise that prickles the small of your back in a way you’re not sure is good or bad. They’re puffing a little like they forgot to breathe, and when their ribcage expands it pushes their locket into where your breast tissue starts, which is kind of painful.

“This is so much easier than kissing Asriel,” they say, high-pitched and faint, grinning, and you start to giggle because it’s true. His mouth just doesn’t fit either of yours naturally and not a single one of you quite knows yet what to do with all his teeth and that big long tongue. Maybe someday you’ll figure it out and it will feel nice instead of awkward and embarrassing, but you don’t know when that day will come.

“I heard that,” says a voice from further away. You turn your head: Asriel is coming around the corner of the deck, skirts lifted up to his heels, fake pouting. “How come the first thing that’s happening now you found Chara is that I’m getting slandered?”

“I don’t think that’s defamation,” Chara says. “No one here is good at interspecies makeouts yet. That’s just true and a fact.”

_“Hmph,”_ says Asriel, still drawing closer. His paws make swishing noises through the grass. “Well, tonight after we go to the tent we can practice more then, since Dad won’t be there watching.”

You bring one hand up from where it had sat at Chara’s hip to make an _ok_ with your fingers. Asriel does not stop a few paces away, but instead sweeps his long arms around the both of you and pulls you into his chest all at once.

It’s warm against his soft and squishy body, but it’s also uncomfortable packed in with your forehead pressed against the line of his jaw. Chara makes a noise of distaste and squirms to find a better position. Asriel’s big paw squeezes your shoulder.

“I’m glad you guys are okay,” he says.

“For some value of okay,” Chara replies in that tone reserved for _joking-but-not-really._ “Let go, Ree. If we’re going to do the stupid prayers (‘stupid’ being the operative word, of course) we have to do it while there’s still light.”

He loosens his hold on you at that, smiling wide. “That means dinner soon, right?” he says, hopeful. “Whatever you and Dad were making smells real good, Frisk.”

You smile and you nod. _It does._

 

 

Much later that night, when you’ve all packed into the tent with one last mug of hot chocolate and you’ve gotten bored at making out incompetently, Chara unzips the flap so that you can all hang out and stare at the night sky. The stars are brighter here away from the neon and streetlights of Ebott City, and especially here on the outskirts of Monster Town. They’re brighter from mountaintops. From the abandoned bus stop you think you were able to make out the Milky Way.

“Why are we supposed to be sleeping outside anyways?” Asriel asks, quite belatedly. “I don’t think I really get it yet.”

You look at Chara, who looks at you and does a little flourish with their hand like they’re deferring.

_Well,_ you begin, _Sukkot is sort of supposed to commemorate the 40 years that the Jews wandered in the desert after we were freed from bondage in Egypt and got the Torah. We didn’t have homes and depended on divine providence to be able to survive._

“There’s a story about Moses and his staff and producing water from stones, but I don’t wanna sidetrack the conversation too much,” Chara adds. “Aside from rock water we got to have manna. Beautiful and poignant as a plate of spaghetti in the tundra.”

“What does Papyrus have to do with anything?” Asriel asks, sounding genuinely puzzled, and you have to laugh into your hands.

_Back when we were going through Snowdin and we passed Papyrus’ spaghetti trap,_ you say, _Chara was just like, “Lo, manna,” and it was hysterical._

“This sort of raises as many questions as it answers,” says Asriel, “but wow, they really DO have Moses on the brain literally all the time.”

_“Shut up,”_ Chara says plaintively. There’s a gentle thump, and Asriel says “ow!” good-naturedly, and then they settle. You shake your hands out and continue.

_Aside from that, though, Sukkot is sort of about—about how ever since we were driven out of Judea all those centuries ago, we’ve never had a real home. We’re a diaspora population, and we tend to get seen as foreign in whatever countries we live in. Sometimes those countries tolerate us but in history there have been a lot of times where for whatever reason that tolerance disappears, and we get kicked out, or have to pack up and leave quickly before something worse happens._

_Sukkot is a harvest festival, so it’s sort of like a thanksgiving holiday, for being grateful for what we have while we have it, even knowing that we might not have it forever. But also, knowing that God and the earth will still be here to provide for us if we have to wander again, because God is everywhere. Anyway, we live and sleep in the sukkah because we’re supposed to be mindful of all that._

You hesitate a little before adding, _My mother liked that it was about appreciating transience, I think because it reminded her of her family’s culture, though she didn’t really talk about that in front of my dad. We always went to temple together for the first day at least. She made sure of that._

“Oh,” says Asriel, apparently not sure what else to say. You look up at the stars rather than at his face.

“My…,” Chara says after a very long pause. “Sometimes my mother used to talk about… how her favorite part of Sukkot was getting to make candy from the citron peels to eat on,” they pause again, “Tu Bishvat.”

Their pronunciation is a little weird the way it often is, but you don’t say anything about that, instead fumbling for your phone. Its light is almost literally blinding against the night and makes your eyes water, but you squint at the search engine and type in _citron peel candy._

“I don’t see how fair it is that _Frisk_ gets to keep their phone out here when _I’m_ not allowed to have electronics,” Asriel grumbles.

“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Frisk didn’t fill Toriel’s socks with handmade slime, unlike _some_ persons in this tent,” Chara says.

“It was _funny!”_ Asriel protests.

You clear your throat to cut them off and show them the page that came up. Asriel leans in right away; Chara scowls and shields their eyes against the screen’s glare first.

_Does this look right?_

“Succade, thought to be named for the Jewish festival of Sukkot, traditional Tu Bishvat snack in Ashkenazi culture,” Chara reads, scrolling with a flick of their finger. “This seems like it’s probably it???”

You take the phone back, regarding it through narrowed eyes. “It looks like you can do this with _any_ citrus fruit’s peel, and some other fruits,” you say. Then you shut it off and put it away, squeezing your eyes shut for a moment against the neon afterimages seared into your eyelids. _I can look up a recipe for us to try after the holiday is over._

“That sounds like it could be nice,” Chara says.

You smile and reach for your mug, tipping it back to drain the rest of your hot chocolate. Tomorrow is sure to be easier than today has been.

 

 

“Just a moment, you three,” Toriel calls to you the next afternoon as you loiter in the hall, waiting for Asgore to finish the day’s garden maintenance so that you can return to his house. “Asgore has asked me to talk to you about something.”

Mystified, you look to Chara and Asriel; the former shrugs, and the latter shakes his head. But Toriel is beckoning, and it won’t do to keep her waiting.

She leads you to her office—the principal’s office—and directs you to sit down.

“Now, Asgore has agreed that I shall take you back to his place after this so that I may be a guest for the holiday,” Toriel says, retrieving her laptop from a drawer, “but I will try to keep this brief so that we will not be late.” She opens it up and taps at the keys, probably unlocking it.

Asriel turns to you, mouthing _What did we do?????_

_Don’t look at ME, what did YOU do?_ you sign back, as unobtrusively as you can.

Toriel turns the laptop around so that the three of you can see it. A web browser is open to a site called “Scarleteen”.

“Oh, _no,”_ Chara says, starting to flush dark crimson.

Toriel folds her hands and gives you her absolute most motherly look of concern. “I, ah, knew that we would have to have this conversation sooner or later, and I will keep to the basics only, in case Frisk or Chara would be more comfortable speaking to Asgore about fine details. But he asked me to at least broach the subject, and it is my responsibility as your guardian.”

“God has a _bastard_ sense of humor,” Chara says, hiding their face, beginning to laugh.

“Do not curse, my child,” Toriel says. “We are still at school.”

You nudge Chara with your elbow. _What do you MEAN?_

“The forecast this morning said this week’s going to have great weather, but we’re about to get warned not to get too _cocky,”_ they say.

_Oh no,_ you say, beginning to giggle.

“Chara, really,” Toriel says, though her voice is quivering and her eyes are dancing in the way that tells you she’s trying not to smile too. “This is a very important subject, and you mustn’t make crude jokes about it or we will be here all the longer and it will likely become even more embarrassing for everyone.”

“I don’t get it,” Asriel complains.

Toriel clears her throat. “Going by what Asgore told me of his observations of the three of you yesterday and last night,” she says, “and looking towards the future, I believe it is well past time that I talk to the three of you about… safety.”

“Oh,” says Asriel, his eyes going round and wide. “Oh, NO.”

“It was going to have to happen at some point, my dears,” Toriel says mock-sadly.

You _very_ highly doubt anyone is going to be in the mood for more makeouts practice tonight, you think sadly, but… if the rest of Sukkot manages to pass calmly and without too much drama, _maybe_ it will be a small price to pay.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic got fanart from [notinaworldwithoutyou](http://notinaworldwithoutyou.tumblr.com/post/178938716046/)! thank you!


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